This Week in Smartphone Schadenfreude, April 5th Edition

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple's current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place -- best not to linger...). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Outage Huge Success

After severalweeks of failure, CrackBerry.com reports that RIM finally succeeded in taking down their network, as scheduled. Unlike previous outages, reportedly the result of failed upgrade attempts, this one required the pulling down of an overly large Looney-Toons-esque lever marked with a big, red "OFF" and stymied Waterloo based engineers for weeks.

Proving it's easier to succeed with failure than fail with success, once RIM restored their "push" to the legions of addicts, one CrackBerry.com commenter reported the service seemed slower.

On April 1st, CrackBerry.com informed us that RIM, doubtless under heavy iPhone ActiveSync pressure in the board-room, was making the next logical move to expand both their product base and their waist lines: BlackBelly Kitchen Appliances.

According to the CTIA release, each fridge will come complete with enterprise-class "push" water and ice dispensers, and teeny, tiny little tic-tactile keyboards on the handles. No desktop-class browsers, however, are currently planned.

Staff who were on-scene overheard a RIM employee mumble: "@#$%ing Steve Jobs comes out with a multi-touch fridge and think we'll care? We'll just stop-and-run straight to the bathroom... Already got the SureType flusher working in the lab..."

Microsoft Releases Windows Mobile 6.6.6

Unlike the previous item, this one has April Fool's written all over it. Sorry, WMExperts.com, but we're not biting. Just how stupid do you think we are, really? There's no way Microsoft wasted the 6 months between Macworld 2007 and the iPhone release, and the almost 9 months that have followed, on this most incremental update of the beast.

Nice try, especially the Paint.exe'd up screen shots (mad skills there, Bohn!) and pitch-perfect spoof of a classically lame Microsoft presentation. If you'd thrown in a Steve Balmer "Mobile Developers!" dance, it might (might) have been a tad more believable.

Take one Sony Ericsson phone and... throw it away. Then, In a touching vote of confidence to the industrial design force who crafted you everything from the PlayStation line to the Rolly, get HTC to build you a new kit. Finally, in a show of good faith to your longtime Symbian alliance partners, ditch your time-tested, world-dominating OS and shoehorn Windows Mobile 6.6.6 onto the device. And what do you have? The beginning of a Palm-esque downward spiral. (Can you downward spiral from the bottom? We don't know. We're mathlexic, remember?)

WMExperts.com brings us bitter-sweet first impressions on the last rights, in all their banana-slide-out gory glory.

Apparently the device is aimed squarely at North Americans. For a Japanese/Norfinwedish company, that's a pretty overt act of aggression. The minute RIM releases their international-only Symbian-powered Blackberry, it's payback time, fellas!

We blew the Norfinwedish meme already, so no N-Gage jokes from us this week (luckily Nokia supplied their own!). If anything else happened, like say if an Asian powerhouse took a page from RIM's playbook and proudly announced their entry into the iClone market we're blissfully unaware.